Tag: targets

Doctors orders: NZ “must rapidly halve its greenhouse emissions”

fatlenny.jpgIn a hard-hitting article in today’s New Zealand Medical Journal, a group of senior health professionals call for NZ to halve its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. The spokesperson for the recently formed Climate and Health Group, Dr Alex Macmillan says:

Climate change has been described as the biggest global health threat of the 21st century, and the substantial health benefits of action should be fully included in decision-making, as should the harms of inaction.

According to the paper, the health benefits of action to reduce emissions include:

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US should aim for 80% by 2020

Renowned American environmentalist Lester Brown offers measured optimism in an article published in the Washington Post on Sunday. He claims a surprisingly dramatic 9 percent drop in US carbon emissions over the past two years and the promise of further huge reductions.  Part of this decline, he acknowledges, was caused by the recession and higher petrol prices but part of it came from gains in energy efficiency and shifts to carbon-free sources of energy, including record amounts of new wind-generating capacity. He looks ahead to the prospect of further reductions.  

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What cap and converge means with a realistic 2050 emissions target

This New Scientist video is a superb illustration of the tough emissions targets the world needs to be thinking about. More details in the NS story here. The basic premise is that if we take a 2ºC target seriously, then we have to limit our total emissions to 2050 to about 750 billion tonnes of carbon. Then divide that up by the current population of the world, and allocate countries a carbon budget, based on their population, that they can burn by 2050. Not good news for big emitters like the US, which would burn its total budget in about 12 years at current rates. As the presenter suggests, this is only a thought experiment not a model for policy, but it provides a realistic context for policy making. Required viewing.

Why did Nick Smith hide the facts on forestry?

targetGovernment ministers have deliberately played down the role of forestry in meeting emissions targets, documents released under the Official Information Act suggest. Diligent digging at No Right Turn has uncovered a Ministry of Agriculture & Forestry paper [PDF] titled New forest planting and harvesting intentions under high carbon prices, which makes clear that forest planting will increase significantly under a stable Emissions Trading Scheme, and that even a modest ($20/tonne) carbon price could trigger planting of up to 100,000 hectares a year — a rate not seen since the forestry boom of the 1990s, and enough to offset a huge chunk of NZ’s emissions to 2020 and beyond. Climate change minister Nick Smith did not mention these figures during the target consultation process, though it is clear he must have known about them. His failure to front with the facts on forestry amounts to a clear attempt to manipulate public perception of the difficulty of meeting steep targets, and raises serious questions about the agenda driving government policy.

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Science advice to Key: NZ “must be fully involved”

gluckman.jpgThe Government’s new chief scientist, Sir Peter Gluckman, yesterday published an excellent overview of the scientific understanding of climate change and how that impacts on policy in New Zealand. It’s a notably calm and measured piece — about as far from “alarmism” as it’s possible to be. Discussing the consequences of a 3.3ºC increase in global temperature by the 2090’s, Gluckman describes them as “quite scary”:

If the temperature rose by this amount then the scenarios become quite scary in terms of changes in climate, flooding of low-lying areas, new patterns of infectious disease, and reductions in the capacity of many parts of the world to support agriculture and therefore to support our continued existence as we know it. New Zealand would not be immune from these changes.

Others might prefer stronger language… but Sir Peter makes a number of telling points elsewhere. He likens those who oppose the mainstream scientific view on global warming to scientists who argued that AIDS was not a viral disease:

A similar debate occurred about AIDS, where a minority of scientists maintained for a long time that the disease was not caused by a virus. This view was manifestly wrong in the eyes of most scientists, but nevertheless some distinguished scientists, albeit usually not experts in virology, took different views until the science became irrefutable. The political consequences of this denialism had tragic results in some African countries.

Gluckman leaves the obvious corollary unspoken, so I hope he’ll forgive me for putting it into my own words: we can expect tragic results to flow from climate denial.

I’ll quote his final paragraph in full:

There is no easy answer -– the science is solid but absolute certainty will never exist. As part of the global community, New Zealand has to decide what economic costs it will bear and what changes in the way we live will be needed. We must be involved. This is a global challenge, and a country like ours that aspires to be respected as a leading innovative nation cannot afford to appear to be not fully involved. Indeed, such a perception would compromise our reputation and potential markets.

This is the advice John Key is receiving, and it’s good to see that Gluckman, while being measured and careful, is not underplaying the size of the problem or the role we should play. In fact, it might be possible to detect a mild rebuke for the government’s pusillanimous approach to emissions targets in the phrase we “cannot afford to appear to be not fully involved”. 10 – 20% is a long way from “fully involved”, I would argue.